Thought and ideas on using Hybrid Cloud, SaaS, IoT and integration middleware technologies to connect devices, people and systems, making this place a better place to live...

Sunday, May 1, 2016

World's first Microservices business process designer

It might sound cheesy to say that RoboMQ, a little startup based out of Northern Virginia, has created world’s first visual process builder for Microservices. However it is very true! Using RoboMQ Integration Flow Designer, you can build complex business processes using a palette of functional nodes each of which represent a well defined Microservice running on the cloud.

The idea is very simple. Microservices have evolved from SOA(Service Oriented Architecture), trying to solve the issues around SOA and making the services truly atomic, independent, fine grained and composable. You should and you could build complex event processing(CEP) and businesses processes using a collection of chained Microservices. This is exactly what RoboMQ Microservices platform has been providing. Using RoboMQ Message Oriented Middleware(MOM) and ThingsConnect multi-protocol API gateway you could build microservices on RoboMQ Microservices platform. You simply take a set of Microservices and chain them over message queues and you have a working business flow. This chaining is done by configuration files that connect the Microservices running on cloud ( or on-premise) using RoboMQ message oriented middleware.

However, our customers often ask - Is there a visual way to chain the microservices and be able to create processes vs. build them using configuration files? The developers love the configuration but it will make the Microservices platform easily usable by the analysts, designer and the architect if they could build flow using an easy, friendly and intuitive GUI. Like any smart person, we looked around on the web and tried to find a visual tool for it. We found none and it was not surprising given the newness of the Microservices architecture. So we set about building a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) platform for this purpose.

We are happy and proud to announce that we have launched RoboMQ “Integration Flow Designer” this week after months of development and testing.

Fig 1: RoboMQ Integration Flow Designer

The Integration Flow Designer present a palette of nodes available to chain together to create a process flow. These nodes represent Microservices and the basic constructs to build the business processes. Each of these nodes can have an input and an output. Each nodes gets an input and feeds the output to the next node as the input, creating a chain of processing. Architecturally, Integration Flow Designer follows Flow Based Programming(FBP) principles. The edge nodes can read the data or write the data over any protocol to any end application using the ThingsConnect adapters and connectors themselves available as nodes.

Fig 2: Integration Flow Designer architecture

Once a flow is visually build, you can click to deploy the flow- as simple as that. The flow runs on the cloud or on your on premise data center on the app server which itself is dockerized. The flow executes and interacts with Microservices running on the container management platform (representing each node). It directs the Microservices to pick the task or the input from the message queues and process them. The result of each node’s processing is written to the output and is picked up by the next node or the Microservice in the flow sequence. The end result is an orchestrated execution of a chain of Microservices using a simple visual user interface.

Integration Flow Designer packs all the benefits available with Microservices, message queues and ThingsConnect suite of adapters and connectors in a simple visual package for rapid development of integration flow for SaaS and IoT use cases.

Now you can connect any device, sensor, SaaS application or enterprise system using any protocol by the simple drop and drop of nodes from a palette!!

If you would like to learn more or see a demo of the product live in action send us a email as sales@robomq.io or contract us from our website.